


Out of the Woods

by lusilly



Series: Earth-28 [8]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Robin (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Cute, F/M, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 20:20:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20766380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: Damian has to solve a riddle.





	Out of the Woods

“What travels all around the world, but always stays in the corner?”

“A stamp.”

“The poor have me. The rich need me. What am I?”

“Nothing.”

“What, if you put it in a barrel, will make the barrel lighter?”

Damian hesitated, then frowned. “A – lower caliber bullet?” His father cocked an eyebrow, and the penny dropped. “Oh,” he said. “Not that kind of barrel. A hole.”

“Forward,” began Bruce, “I am heavy. Backwards, I am not. What am I?”

“A ton,” said Damian.

“What kind of flowers grow on your face?”

“Tulips,” Damian said, “but that one’s dumb.”

“You have one match,” Bruce instructed him, tone very serious. “You enter a room in which there is a kerosene lamp, an oil burner, and a wood burning stove. Which do you light first?”

“The match,” answered Damian.

At this, Bruce finally gave an approving nod. He typed something in the computer, apparently distracted, as Damian finished tugging on his gloves. “A man is found dead on the beach next to a rock,” said Bruce; Damian turned to watch his father, listening. “The rock was the cause of death, but never physically touched him. How did he die?”

“He’s Superman,” said Damian, without skipping a beat. “The rock is Kryptonite. Which is actually carcinogenic to any creature, but I suppose for the sake of the riddle it has to be someone who’d die of Kryptonite exposure relatively quickly.”

“Good,” Bruce said, without turning from the screen. “How far can you run into the woods?”

There was a moment’s pause. Damian blinked at his father. “Is that it?” he asked.

“That’s it,” Bruce replied. “How far can you run into the woods?”

Damian took a long breath, considering this. His brow was knit in concentration. “The entire way through?”

“No.”

“As far as you can?”

“No.”

“As far as _I_ can?”

“No.”

There was another short silence as Damian wracked his brain. “Is this one of those, _when are the woods not the woods?_ sort of riddles?

“No,” answered Bruce. “It’s very straightforward.”

“How far can you run into the woods?”

Bruce nodded. “How far can you run into the woods.”

Damian made a noise. “Hm. Can I think on it?”

Resuming his usual work on the computer, Bruce said, “Though that isn’t usually protocol in the field, I know you’re running late, so I’ll excuse you just this once.”

Pressing his domino mask across his face, Damian headed down the steps from the computer hub down to the garage below. “Thanks,” he called. “I’ll have it figured out by the time I get back on Monday.”

Raising his voice to be heard as Damian headed away from him, Bruce called, “I thought we agreed Sunday night?”

“Alfred said Monday was fine if I checked in.”

Begrudgingly, Bruce stopped himself from protesting this. He’d have a conversation with Alfred later. “Be careful,” he called, as a small light on his computer screen informed him Damian was getting into the personal jet. “Have fun.”

The comm inside the jet’s cockpit picked up Damian’s reply, playing it directly out of the computer speakers. “How far can you run into the woods?” he repeated, apparently ignoring his father’s farewell. “Suppose I’ll have to find out, hm?”

The engine roared. A few minutes later, Damian was gone. Bruce sat alone in the empty cave. It was good that Damian was gone more often, spending more time with the Titans, but it also had the odd effect of making the Cave and the Manor itself feel bigger, emptier. Lonelier.

On the flight to Titans Tower, Damian checked in with the rest of his team.

“What do you mean you’re not coming?” he demanded.

Lian Harper let out a frustrated sigh. “I mean I’m not coming, I have a family thing.”

“Is it a mission?”

“No, it’s not a mission, it’s a family thing.”

“What kind of-?”

“Oh, right,” said Lian, cutting him off, “I’m sorry Robin, I forgot all of your meaningful familial engagements _are_ missions, my bad.”

This was true enough that Damian didn’t feel particularly cut by it, so he just began cautiously, “Arsenal, I thought we were doing training this weekend.”

“It’s not like I’m stopping you. You know you can actually train without me, right?” Then she added, “And without Sin either, she happens to be in my family so she’s also gotta go to the family thing.”

“You and Sin are our best hand-to-hand combatants. What am I supposed to do without either of you to spar against?”

“Go toe-to-toe with a Kryptonian? Wait, take a video, I want to see Superboy beating the hell out of you.”

Chris wasn’t coming this weekend either, which Damian knew because Superman had reached out to his father to let him know that he would be taking some time off for what Damian’s father had called _medical leave_, but that didn’t sound right to Damian. He knew that Chris had been having some trouble adapting to working in a group, and suspected that maybe he needed some time to decompress, or something. There was something a little off about Chris which Damian couldn’t quite figure out yet, but Chris was surprisingly bad at leadership for being the son of Superman, and awfully quiet in a crowd, and even had difficulty maintaining eye contact for too long. Though Damian didn’t want to pry – he hated the idea of the others noticing his own problems and trying to piece together the illness that haunted him –he was also terribly curious.

Either way, Damian didn’t mention anything about Chris to Lian. Instead he just ended the call, then hesitated, then opened another line on his commlink.

“GL,” he said. There was nothing. “Green Lantern, come in.”

A couple minutes later, he received a text on his encrypted personal phone. _Cant pick up Im in civvies_.

He texted her back. _Are you coming this weekend?_

_ No I cant_, read her reply, not much later. _Its my quince_

Damian didn’t know what _quince_ meant other than _fifteen_ in Spanish, so he didn’t reply. Instead he thought briefly of trying to get a hold of Maxy, but her parents didn’t allow her to spend the night on her own yet anyway, so that seemed kind of pointless.

Jai West also rarely spend the night at Titans Tower, but he was the only other person left that Damian could think of, and he was starting to feel a little desperate.

“Jai,” he said at once, when the line picked up. “How are you?”

On the other end, Jai sounded confused. “Robin? Why are you calling me?”

Tactful as ever. “I thought we were meeting at the Tower this weekend, but it seems things will be awfully quiet. I was wondering if you planned on coming?”

“Um, no. I have to do homework.”

“And you couldn’t do it at the Tower?”

“Not really, because usually you guys all have to rush out at once to do a mission or something, and I’m not a big fan of the way the giant T-shaped tower is basically a supervillain magnet.”

This was more or less fair. “Well, I’ll be there if you do decide to stop by.”

“OK,” said Jai. “I think Irey’s already there anyway, so I don’t really have a ride.”

Something dropped into the pit of Damian’s stomach. “I see,” he said. “Well, let me know if you’d like to come. I can always pick you up.”

“Okey-doke. Hey, maybe next weekend.”

“Maybe next weekend,” Damian agreed. “Goodnight, then.”

“’Bye, Robin.”

The jet continued to race through the sky, chasing the setting sun. Below him, he could see a great rolling forest splayed across the landscape. _How far can you run into the woods?_ As far as you could walk, just faster?

He slowed his pace as he reached Titans Tower, circling three times, then landing beneath the Bay. Maybe he wouldn’t stay the entire weekend; but then again, the earlier he left, the sooner he’d have to come up with the answer to his father’s riddle. It seemed frustratingly impossible at the moment, but perhaps the frustration was mostly just a redirection from something else.

So he exited the jet and headed up into the Tower itself with a heavy, roiling feeling in his stomach, nervous and unwell.

Recently, for what was the fifth time since he’d started taking medication, he’d had a change in dosage; after a month or so on his previous meds, his anxiety had gotten so bad he’d barely been able to spend time with the Titans at all, even though he had categorically refused to admit this to his father. But biweekly appointments with a therapist meant that these things were caught earlier rather than later, and now here he was, trying a different cocktail of medication to see if the side effects would be more tolerable this time.

Damian felt like a living economics experiment, an exercise in pareto efficiency: what was the optimal combination to make the symptoms of his OCD better off without making at least one other side effect worse off? At least in economics one could always solve dilemmas like these with a charts and tables and numbers. Nothing was that uncomplex for Damian.

But at least the anxiety in the pit of his stomach wasn’t paralyzing as he headed up to the main level of the Tower. The big television, which took up nearly an entire wall, was on when Damian stepped out of the elevator.

A girl popped her head over the couch. “Robin!” she said, sounding a little surprised. “I didn’t know if you were coming!” She laughed, leaning over the back of the couch. “I kind of thought I’d have the Tower to myself tonight. But this is cool, that’d be boring anyway.”

Damian stood awkwardly by the elevator. “Impulse,” he said. She was not wearing her uniform, and her curly hair was big and surrounded her head like a halo, instead of in her usual braids. He suddenly felt very stupid, standing there in his full uniform and mask. “I…didn’t realize you were here already.”

This was a lie, but his mouth was suddenly dry and he had to come up with something to say to avoid sounding stupid. Iris just grinned at him.

She pointed back at the TV screen. “You want to watch?” she asked. “It’s kind of boring, but Lian got me addicted.”

“I have some training to do,” Damian blurted out.

“Oh,” she said. “OK. Well, I’ll be here.”

There was a momentary pause. Iris didn’t turn away, just watched him expectantly. “I…suppose I could put it off a little,” he said, finally. She beamed at him, her face lighting up. “Watching television doesn’t appear to require the uniform, though,” he added. “I’ll go change.”

“It’s OK,” said Iris quickly. “I like the costume! It’s nice.”

If she, too, blushed, Damian didn’t catch it. While he tried furiously not to look her in the eye, she let out a little laugh. In the blink of an eye, she appeared before him, running so fast it could’ve been teleportation.

Without hesitating, she reached out and gently peeled at the corner of his domino mask, tugging it off his skin. Despite himself, he let her.

“You’re good,” she told him, crossing her arms as if appraising him like a piece of art. “It’s weird when you leave the mask on, but I don’t mind everything else if you don’t mind it.”

She was very close to him. He reached out and snatched his mask back from her, then rubbed at his left eye, then caught himself and stopped. “Maybe I do mind.”

“Maybe you don’t,” she countered.

She flickered again, then reappeared at the couch. “Come watch with me?” she asked, glancing back at him from over the couch’s back.

He hesitated another moment, then he let out a long breath and set aside his mask. He took off his cape, then his gloves, then his boots, and then he joined Iris on the couch. He sat at the opposite side, transparently as far away from her as possible.

“What is this?” he asked, watching the screen.

“Kay-you-double-you-tee-kay,” Iris replied. When he glanced at her, she grinned at him and then clarified, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Do you know the Kardashians? I feel like your dad’s famous enough that odds are good you’ve run into them at some point.”

Damian looked back towards the screen. “I don’t know the Kardashians,” he said, watching whatever reality TV drama was going down. “I don’t even know who they are.”

“Consider yourself lucky,” Iris told him, throwing a nice embroidered pillow at him. “They’re really annoying.”

“Why do you watch the show, then?”

She shrugged. “Guilty pleasure.”

They sat in silence for a while, watching TV. Iris was also on her phone, scrolling through something, playing a game; she could never focus on one thing for too long. Damian, on the other hand, found the show somewhat riveting, but couldn’t really get into it because he was acutely aware of the fact that Iris was sitting a mere few feet away from him.

An episode and a half passed. Damian glanced at Iris. She was typing something into her phone, probably texting someone. There was a smile on her face.

He rubbed at his eye, then stopped it. “I talked to your brother,” he said, all of the sudden. “He said he had homework to finish, or something?”

Iris glanced up. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “My mom’s been sort of training him on xenophysics lately. It’s cool.”

“Just him? Not you?”

With a smile that was almost apologetic, Iris explained, “I kind of got bored after she explained it the first time. He’s learning all the numbers and stuff, I don’t really need that.”

“Why not?”

She looked back to her phone. “’Cause I get it already,” she said mildly. “Most people need math and stuff to understand things like that, so they can kind of work it out step by step. When you’re as fast as I am it’s like explanations like that are moving in slow motion. I _get_ it. I don’t need to go backwards.”

Damian found this fascinating. He watched her, a gentle frown on his face. “So you don’t need to understand the equation,” he began, thoughtfully, “if you already understand the answer.”

At this, she looked up, and actually lowered her phone to her lap. “Yeah,” she said. “Basically.”

He nodded. “I can relate. My friend Colin, he’s our age,” he remembered Iris’s weird rapid-aging phenomenon and corrected, “my age – I’ve been tutoring him in chemistry. It’s basic stuff but sometimes it gets very difficult to explain, because it’s like,” he paused, searching for the right way to express this, “it’s like – _there_, that is the answer, obviously, but then he asks how I got there and I can’t really tell him.”

Iris’s eyes lit up. “Yeah!” she said, nodding. “Exactly! Like, I don’t know how I know that but I just know it.”

There was an awkward sort of silence. On the TV, Kim gave a tearful confession. Damian asked, casually, “So you don’t have any homework to take care of while you’re here?”

“No,” answered Iris, shaking her head. “I have a couple assignments but I can do them on Sunday. How ‘bout you?”

“I have an assignment too,” Damian said, thinking of the riddle. “But I don’t need to get it done right away.”

Iris cocked an eyebrow at him. “Do you go to school?”

“No,” he said. “Homeschooled. You?”

She shook her head. “Same. I was in middle school with Jai for a little bit but I couldn’t make it through classes. Too boring.”

Damian, who had never been in a traditional classroom and therefore couldn’t relate, just sort of nodded at this. The TV show droned on before them, but it was quickly growing old, so Damian offered, “Would you like to…go over some case files? Maybe we can identify our next mission before it falls into our lap.”

Iris looked at him brightly. “That could be fun,” he said. “Everyone else might want a say, though.”

Damian shrugged. “They’re not here,” he said simply.

For a second, she just watched him with something almost like suspicion in her eyes. Then a smile stole across her lips. “I guess so,” she said. “C’mon.” She was instantly on her feet, across the room, at the door. “Let’s go.”

When she began heading down towards the computer hub, Damian instead took her by the hand and pulled her in another direction. As soon as he realized what he was doing, heat rose suddenly to his face and he let go of her; embarrassed, he did not glance around to see her face. If he had, he might’ve seen she was smiling.

“My, uh,” he cleared his throat, “database on the computer downstairs is better. It’s got all of Batman’s files, so it’s more detailed.”

“_All_ of Batman’s files?” asked Iris. If she was faking impressed, Damian couldn’t tell. “Wow.”

They went downstairs, to where Damian had an entire floor of the Tower to himself. Milagro liked to make fun of him for it, but he needed the room for his own tech and uniform and computer and also for his personal space.

There was only one seat before his massive computer downstairs, itself a smaller version of the Batcomputer in the Cave. He insisted that Iris take it, then giggled at him. “What a gentleman,” she said, amused. “You can always sit on my lap if you get tired of standing.”

He fought the blush rising to his cheeks.

Together they scrolled through the list of active cases, focusing in their particular area. “Looks like Green Arrow and the rest of his team take care of the worst missions up here,” said Damian, gesturing to a swath of dots on the map which represented completed missions. “That must be what they’re doing this weekend.”

“This weekend?” echoed Iris doubtfully. “I don’t think GA’s taking any missions this weekend.”

Damian raised an eyebrow at her. “I heard otherwise from Arsenal.”

Iris blinked at him, then she took her phone out of her pocket, scrolling through her texts. “Hold on,” she said. “I swore Lian said she was doing that marathon thing tomorrow.”

“Marathon?” echoed Damian, leaning over Iris’s shoulder, looking at her phone. There were an awful lot of heart emojis in her texts to Lian. “What marathon?”

“The AIDS one,” she said, then, triumphantly, she turned her phone around to show him the screen. “Yeah, the Star City AIDS Walk. Her family does it every year.”

Frowning at the phone, Damian reached out instinctually to take it – Iris pulled it away sharply, grinning at him. “AIDS Walk?” he asked, confused. “Why would they do that?”

“Um,” began Iris, “because it’s a charity and the Queen family are like the biggest philanthropists this side of Gotham City, obviously.” She poked him in the side then added, “You’re telling me your dad doesn’t do marathons for charity?”

“No,” answered Damian honestly. “No marathons or triathlons.”

The light of the computer screen lit up Iris’s face harshly as she gave him a confused look. “That’s…really specific?”

“In my family,” Damian explained, “we’re not supposed to do anything which might publicly draw attention to our…” he paused, searching for the right words, “atypical level of physical fitness.”

“What?” asked Iris, scandalized. “The public isn’t even allowed to know you’re _hot?_”

Despite himself, a smile tugged its way onto Damian’s lips. He leaned against the computer panel. “I’m afraid not,” he told her, almost ruefully. “So, if you could keep that between us…”

She laughed at him. Something glinted in her eyes and though Damian could not quite identify what it was, he liked it. A lot.

“Between us,” she echoed, watching him. “Sounds like a nice place.”

There was a short, loaded silence.

Then, before Damian could blink, she disappeared. A moment later she was back, this time sitting before the couch, laying a deck of cards down on a low coffee table before it. Without glancing up at him, she called, “You wanna play a game?”

He went around to the other side of the coffee table, then lowered himself to the ground. “Poker?”

“I was thinking Go Fish,” she replied, shuffling the deck.

“Go what?”

Iris stopped short and looked up at him. For a second she said nothing, then she narrowed her eyes and leaned forward across the table. Disbelievingly, she asked, “You don’t know what Go Fish is?”

“No,” he answered, truthfully. “Should I?”

A look of concern on her face, she watched him for a second. Then she asked, “How about War?”

“About what?”

“Rummy?”

He shook his head. “I know Solitaire,” he offered.

“What about Bullshit?” she asked him, with narrowed eyes. “Have you ever heard of that?”

This made him hesitate. “I mean – the term generally? Because if so then yes.”

“It’s a game,” she said, then she started the split the cards between them. “I’ll teach you.”

She did teach him; it was a fun game, if only because Damian appeared to be so calm and cool all the time that Iris started calling bullshit on every set of cards he laid down, so it didn’t take long for him to win. They played again. This time Iris called every one of his hands correctly, while he was only right about half of hers. She won.

Once the game was over, he asked her admiringly, “How did you do that? You can’t possibly have decoded my mannerisms that quickly.”

She grinned at him. So fast she seemed not to move at all, she collected every one of the cards – including those in his hand – and stacked them in a neat pile on the table.

“I cheated,” she said.

They got bored of card games quickly, and after poking through some potential missions they got bored of that too. Iris asked him if he wanted to watch a movie, and he said yes even though he didn’t really want to. She made some popcorn as he scrolled through Netflix. “We should get a pizza,” she called, standing at the microwave waiting for the popcorn. “No! Some Chinese food. I can just run out and get it, they don’t need to deliver it all the way here. Actually,” she said thoughtfully, tapping her chin, “I could go run out and get any food. What do you feel like, Robin?” she asked him. “Chicken nuggets?”

“You can call me Damian,” he called in reply.

She stopped, looking at him.

He glanced back at her, then he gestured around them. “There’s nobody here,” he said. “You don’t need to call me Robin. We’re not in uniform.”

“You are,” she pointed out.

He pointed to his face, the missing mask. “Not in full uniform, anyway.”

There was a beat of silence. Then she asked, “No on the chicken nuggets?”

As he took a seat on the couch, he told her, “I don’t eat meat. But you should get some if you want some.”

“No meat?” The microwave beeped. She took it out of the microwave and dumped it into a bowl, then went over to the couch. Without hesitation, she sat right next to Damian, close enough that the side of their legs touched. “Maybe pizza then,” she said, matter-of-factly. “But maybe later.”

She offered him the bowl of popcorn. He was extremely uncomfortable, and his stomach kind of hurt, so he declined.

When Damian started to play the movie he’d chosen, Iris let out a whine. “Really?” she asked. “A black-and-white movie? How old is this?”

Indignantly, Damian replied, “It’s a classic!” which he only knew because he’d found it under the _Classics_ section on Netflix.

“It’s _boring_.” Iris threw a handful of popcorn into her mouth. “I’m gonna fall asleep.”

Something was screaming inside Damian’s head, but he tried to ignore it. He summoned up all the courage in his little fifteen-year-old body, the kind of courage that allowed him to jump off buildings and bridges and face goons with automatic weapons without blinking – and he moved his arm up, and he slid it around Iris’s shoulders.

Without looking away from the TV screen, he murmured, “That’d be OK.”

There was a tense second, and then Iris sort of settled against his arm. She held the bowl of popcorn in her lap and tried to lean her head against his shoulder but she was a little too tall; so she scooted down in her seat a little, and tried again. This time it worked.

The whole movie Damian’s pulse was elevated, which he wondered if she could feel. It was a weird feeling, a sort of buzzing in his head and a simultaneous sort of quiet, a focus, something that he really really liked despite the fact that it made him feel really uncomfortable.

She finished the popcorn, then put the bowl aside. “Damian,” she said, for the very first time, tasting the name in her mouth. It didn’t feel right, didn’t suit him the way _Robin_ did.

He glanced at her. She lifted her hand and with two fingers turned his face towards her so she could see him better. Her eyes roved across his face, searching through his gaze and his sharp brow and down to the gentle curve of his nose and the width of his mouth. She liked him better without the mask, she decided. She liked seeing his eyes, as dark a brown as her own.

While she looked at him, he clenched his jaw. His brain felt like it was short-circuiting a little bit: he couldn’t think of anything to say.

Something popped up spontaneously, something he’d been turning over and over in his mind again and again, repetitively, obsessively, since leaving home earlier that evening. It spilled from his mouth before he could think about it, before he could consider if it made any sense or if it didn’t fit the moment or if it was going to interrupt whatever was happening right now.

It came out just as Iris leaned in, like a physical block between their faces, because if what Damian thought was happening was actually happening he wasn’t sure if he could do it without something bad happening, though he didn’t know what. The nebulousness of the thought scared him, the uncertainty principle, the potential chaotic motion of the double rod pendulum of himself.

“Iris,” he said, arresting the moment; in surprise and a little bit of shock at hearing him use her name for the first time, she stopped. He let out a silent but shaky breath. “How far,” he asked, “can you run into the woods?”

She stared at him.

Unhelpfully, he clarified, “It’s – a riddle.”

She didn’t say, “Oh,” or make any other indication of confusion. She just looked at him thoughtfully, then away from him for a moment. Then she met his gaze once more, and she smiled

“Halfway,” she answered. He stared at her, his brow knit. “You can only run halfway _in_,” she explained, “then you start running _out_.”

She grinned. Before them, the black-and-white movie continued to play, a rush of music rising to crescendo as the characters onscreen shared their first kiss.


End file.
